The Ancient Male Art of Monitoring the Situation

There is a famous quote attributed to Leon Trotsky to the effect of: “You may not be interested in the war, but war is interested in you.”

Leon, buddy, let me stop you right at that comma. If you have been watching the social media feeds of dudes (including mine) since early Saturday morning—the beginning of what we now know is called Operation Epic Fury—you will know that there is no chance that we are not interested in the war, which we can watch play out in almost alarming detail in near–real time on the internet.

When there’s modern military conflict, men are, as the self-deprecating but unusually sincere internet meme now goes, “monitoring the situation.”